Rogers internet outage - back to the stone age

[DrakeM]

Yesterday Rogers, a Canadian phone/internet/cable company, lost their entire network for most of the day across the entire country. Something like 25% of Canadians had no internet, cable, phone, and/or cellphone access for almost all of Friday. Must have been something major to have crippled everything. I get that if they lost their internet backbone, none of their services would work, but everywhere? The whole country? I was one of the "lucky" people to have all my services with Rogers so I was completely cut off - no TV, internet, landline, or cellphone. It was like being back in the stone age, admittedly with electricity. So far everything is "working" today but nothing is 100% right yet.

So far Rogers has been tight-lipped about what caused it claiming the investigation is ongoing. I'm speculating something stupid like a bad software upgrade, or more sinister, was Russia testing its ability to cripple a country?

 

[tvstrip]

So what was it like? How did you, or kids if you had them, deal with it?

 

[DrakeM]

So what was it like? How did you, or kids if you had them, deal with it?

I went outside (remember that place?) and did long overdue chores and enjoyed the sunshine. Later in the day, I put a few TV shows I happen to have downloaded onto a USB and watched them on my main TV via its media player. Somewhere around 9:30 pm local time enough of the internet came back that I was able to stream some sports on my computer.

As for the cause of the outage, I saw one Rogers exec claim it was a bad software upgrade while another more technical spokesman says it is still unclear how it happened.

Last night despite TV being back, the service was shitty with live TV freezing or losing audio every 15 seconds or so. For some reason, Netflix was clean so I watched that instead.